I love the herbed bread that’s served with the pasta at Capers and I wanted to look for a recipe for them. I have no idea what they’re called so I went searching for bread stick recipes instead. I came across one at Wild Yeast and it looked so good I just had to try it.

I must say though that I was quite disappointed in mine. *laughs* I didn’t dare to let them bake till they were golden brown, because the last time I tried to golden brown my breads in my mum’s oven, they turned out rock hard and inedible. So my breadsticks were rather pale and not as pretty in comparison, but they did taste good. I prefer mine with a crunch but with a soft center (yes, I like my crusty breads).

I wasn’t going to have plain bread sticks for lunch, so I wanted to make a soup to go along with it. I have a simple recipe for tomato and lentil soup in this small little recipe book I’d bought so I decided to try it. I bought lentils a very long time ago but never had time to try it. Basically, the soup consists of chopped onions (sauteed till they’re transparent and then fried with a bit of curry powder, if you like the aroma), chopped tomatoes, lentils and chicken stock. Salt and pepper to taste. The lentils should be cooked already, I think. Because otherwise, this supposedly short-cooking meal ended up taking a very long time because the lentil wouldn’t soften. I had to keep adding water, cup after cup after cup. Now the book requested that you puree the whole thing. Obviously, once pureed, it was dip and no longer soup. O_o I didn’t think it made good soup as the pureed stuff didn’t have enough of a bite if you watered it down, so I kept it as dip. -_- But it did taste really good. ^_^;

This was what the tomato and lentil soup looked like in the pan:

I like it as the tomato adds quite a nice flavour to this. I usually dislike dhal as I find it quite bland, but it seems I can make my own dahl that’s to my own liking now. Note to self, next time, don’t completely puree the ‘soup’, and don’t cook it till it’s so thick.

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On a side note, I seemed to be quite unlucky today. I scalded the middle finger of my left hand on the baking tray of my grissini–something that’s never happened before. The burn wasn’t bad enough to blister but it did hurt like hell, and my skin discoloured. Then it seems that my mum left the grater on the drying container slicing side up, and I must have grazed my hand across it when putting the washed spoons and utensils in the same container to dry, because I suddenly noticed a slice of skin peeling off on the first joint of the index finger on my right hand. And that didn’t hurt, but it did hurt a lot when I realised that I use my right hand for a lot of things and all the work didn’t help the wound heal any faster. -_-

Then the next day, I didn’t notice that a step on the stairs was occupied by a large paper tray, so I stubbed my right toe against it and as I was in the action of stepping down, my right leg slid against the tray and pretty much scraped off a large bit of skin on the front of my leg. -_- The skin on our legs is pretty thin, isn’t it? Cos the whole patch bled rather nicely. -_- So now I’ve got an ugly leg, and I wear above knee pants pretty much all the time. ToT